I also love speakerphones. It’s much more comfortable than holding a phone pressed to my ear, especially on a long call. I only do it when alone though, or occasionally in the presence of my wife.
I’m not sure why it’s annoying to hear someone else’s speakerphone conversation in public, but it is. It’s always seemed strange to me that it’s more annoying than just hearing two people conversing in person. I guess part of it is that people tend to speak more loudly when on the phone than when conversing with someone next to them, but I’m not sure that’s the whole explanation.
I have hearing issues. Under the best circumstances I can understand half what the other person is saying and guess the rest. I should really invest in a headset but I don’t use the phone enough to justify it.
I’m in Johnstown, PA. You may have heard of our floods? We also have (had) this thing called Thunder in the Valley, which was a biker meet-up at the end of June. It was held here in town for years but now it has been moved one town over. I forget why. This makes me and my noise-shy dog very happy, as the constant revving rumble of bikes got on our nerves.
The best festival we have here is"Squonkapalooza," a celebration of PA’s very own cryptid, the Squonk. It’s a creature so ugly that it hides in the woods and cries until it dissolves into a puddle of tears. Squonkapalooza is a fun activity for the whole family. If you’re in the area, it’s on August 1st this year. https://squonkapalooza.com/
I put the phone on speaker when I am on hold, and I go do other things while listening to the hold music. When a human answers on the other end, I pick up the handset on my end.
Finger Lakes wine and lake country. Also some years we get fall tree color well worth traveling for if you don’t get that at home. Also other miscellaneous.
I picked seasonal, because there’s definitely a seasonal aspect to it (the lake people are mostly Memorial Day to Labor Day, the tree peepers are October, and some of the tourist stuff closes for winter) but there is some of it year round.
I think one or both of my phones will do speakerphone but I haven’t got around to figuring out how. I would probably only use it for hold lines anyway.
I waffled on the “tourist” question because it depends on what you mean by the “area” lived in. I live in London which gets vast numbers of tourists all year round and so when I’m out and about I do encounter them a lot, especially in the summer, and they can clog up public transportation etc. But I live in the suburbs with no nearby tourist spots, so they don’t bother me where I literally live.
Our city attracts regional visitors for certain events (notably Oktoberfest), but I selected “other,” because the thing we have that’s closest to the spirit of the poll is a genuine Catholic pilgrimage destination called the Guadalupe Shrine (it’s about six miles southeast of town).
My area gets tourists year-round, but the vast majority are here in the winter. A lot of them start arriving right after Thanksgiving with the biggest influx after Christmas. Most leave just before Easter.
There’s nothing like driving on a two-lane blacktop with a 75mph limit and being stuck behind a Winnebago with Minnesota plates tooling along at 45mph.
If I define my area as “the Chicago metropolitan area,” then, yes, there are a lot of tourists, year-round.
But, even if I define “area” to a few miles around where I live, it’s still a year-round tourist attraction. I live a few blocks away from the Brookfield Zoo, which is one of the highest-attended zoos in the U.S., and attracts many visitors from outside the area. I also live less than a mile from the city of Riverside, which is a “planned community,” and which attracts visitors interested in architecture: it has several buildings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, as well as houses and buildings designed by other prominent architects.
For part 2 of the question: yes, “tourism” does impact my lifestyle, a little bit, on occasion, mostly when it’s nice weather, and/or a big event at the Zoo. The main parking lot for the zoo is located on the street which runs along the side of my house, and on certain days (e.g., the first nice weekend day in spring, Mother’s Day, nice evenings when the Zoo is doing their Christmas lights event), traffic backs up on that street for hours, and I’ll have to take alternate routes if I want to leave the house. It’s a minor inconvenience, at most.
I live in Los Angeles, so there are tourists everywhere all the time. I like to help out the clueless ones, and the people who pronounce Sepulveda Sep pul VEED ah.
I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. Obviously San Francisco gets tons of tourists, but the suburb I live in doesn’t. So I said I don’t get any tourists.
I was referring to Oktoberfest.
As for the Guadalupe Shrine, I don’t think they get quite enough visitors to make it enough of a “tourist attraction” to give our city a “tourist destination” vibe…but YMMV.
We just moved to a street with many cherry blossoms, and we’ve had tourists standing in the middle of the street (it’s not busy) taking pictures. Clearly going to be a once-a-year thing for my actual house. I’m in Vancouver, though, so I think there are tourists in the general vicinity year-round.
“Have you ever seen a squonk’s tears? Well, look at mine…” 